GreenBang reports that Siemens its expanding its presence in the ocean energy market - In marine current energy, Siemens wants to be 800-lb gorilla.

There’s a lot of energy in the world’s oceans, and Siemens wants to play a big part in developing that power for our use.

The Germany-based technology giant announced today that it’s taken on a larger stake in a British marine-energy company, Marine Current Turbines Ltd. Siemens first dipped its toe into the marine current tidal energy sector in February of 2010, when it acquired a minor stake in the company. It now has a 45-percent stake.

“With this increase in its stake, Siemens is strengthening its activities in ocean power generation,” said Michael Axmann, CFO of the newly founded Solar & Hydro Division within Siemens’ Energy Sector. “We will actively shape the commercialization process of innovative marine current power plants.” ...

Some estimates say tidal power plants deployed around the world could generate up to 800 terawatt-hours of clean energy each year. That’s enough to meet 3 to 4 percent of the world’s energy needs, and 25 percent more than all the energy used in Germany.

Marine Current Turbines plans to present two project investment prospectuses to the market in November: one for the 8 megawatt (MW) Kyle Rhea project in Scotland and another for the 10MW Anglesey Skerries project in Wales. The company also has lease approval to deploy a 100MW tidal farm off Brough Ness on the southernmost tip of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. ...

The company has already demonstrated its first commercial-scale project, SeaGen in Northern Ireland. Since November 2008, two turbines with a combined capacity of 1.2MW have been plugged into the grid and providing enough power to supply about 1,500 homes. With more than 2.7 gigawatt-hours of electricity generated so far, SeaGen is so far the top electricity producer in the marine current power sector.

The name “Kawasaki” may be most readily associated with motors of the two-wheeled, gasoline-powered variety; but the Japanese multinational company has recently announced that it will soon be getting into the tidal power generation business. Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) has announced that it will work with Okinawa Electric Power and Okinawa New Energy Development to prepare a new tidal power generator technology for testing off the coast of Okinawa, Japan. Then, KHI will test the technology at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney, Scotland.

The EMEC is the first center of its kind to offer developers an opportunity to test full-scale, grid-connected prototypes under high velocity wave and tidal conditions. High velocity currents at the tidal test site at the Fall of Warness, where the KHI technology will be tested, reach almost 4m/sec (7.8 knots). The facility offers seven test beds at depths ranging from 12 to 50 meters, in an area of over three square miles.

Earth2Tech reports that Siemens in investing in a CPV (concentrating solar PV) company - Siemens invests in solar startup Semprius.

Power gear giant Siemens has bought a 16-percent stake in startup Semprius, a semiconductor tech company that makes solar concentrating photovoltaics, which use mirrors and lenses to concentrate sunlight onto highly efficient solar cells. ...

Semprius already had a partnership with Siemens to jointly develop and deploy a “plug-and-play" CPV demonstration system based on Semprius’ solar module arrays and Siemens’ automation and control components. Last year, the companies said the systems are planned to be installed in numerous test sites, including at utility, commercial, and government facilities. In Siemens’ announcement this morning, it says it will act as a strategic investor to help Semprius develop the technology.

Semprius’ innovation is around what it calls a micro-transfer printing technology, which rapidly stamps semiconducting material onto a substrate, such as glass or plastic (see a video here). The technology is a faster and less expensive way to produce semiconductor devices – in this case solar modules, but it could be extended to other industries such as disk drives – than current manufacturing techniques on the market. ...

Siemens owns substantial clean power and solar technology, bought solar thermal company Solel back in 2009 and has been developing solar thermal products for various plants going online soon.

Solar concentrating PV hasn’t gotten a lot of respect in the past, but in recent months has gotten a growing amount of attention and interest via a series of projects, power contract announcements and a $90.6 million federal loan guarantee for a large 30 MW solar power plant in Colorado. Globally, around 690 MW worth of solar concentrating PV projects are in development, including 28 MW in operation, 41 MW under construction, and another 621 MW under development, according to GTM Research.

Technology Review has an article on GE and Siemens adopting direct drive wind turbines - Wind Turbines Shed Their Gears.

Wind turbine manufacturers are turning away from the industry-standard gearboxes and generators in a bid to boost the reliability and reduce the cost of wind power.

Siemens, the world's largest turbine manufacturer by volume, has begun selling a three-megawatt turbine using a so-called direct-drive system that replaces the conventional high-speed generator with a low-speed generator that eliminates the need for a gearbox. And last month, General Electric announced an investment of 340 million euros in manufacturing facilities to build its own four-megawatt direct-drive turbines for offshore wind farms.

Most observers say the industry's shift to direct-drive is a response to highly publicized gearbox failures. But Henrik Stiesdal, chief technology officer of Siemens's wind power unit, says that gearbox problems are overblown. He says Siemens is adopting direct-drive as a means of generating more energy at lower cost. "Turbines can be made more competitive through direct-drive," says Stiesdal.

Siemens's plans hinge on a new design that reduces the weight of the system's generator. In conventional wind turbines, the gearbox increases the speed of the wind-driven rotor several hundred fold, which radically reduces the size of the generator required. Direct-drive generators operate at the same speed as the turbine's blades and must therefore be much bigger--over four meters in diameter for Siemens's three-megawatt turbine. Yet Siemens claims that the turbine's entire nacelle weighs just 73 metric tons--12 tons less than that on its less powerful, gear-driven 2.3-megawatt turbines.

There have been plenty of plans to switch Australia to 100% clean energy floated in recent times (see Beyond Zero Emissions and Desertec Australia for some examples).

The latest entrant is from Siemens, with their "Picture the Future: Australia (Energy)" (pdf) report recommending Australian business and governments spend $60 billion on alternative energy initiatives.

The report says that to meet 2050 carbon emission targets, all road vehicles would need to be electrically powered and all electricity would come from a mix of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro and gas (along with carbon-capture coal, which is an unlikely component).

Siemens also recommends all buildings be made energy efficient and smart grids helping to match demand with supply. Large-scale energy storage is expected to enable solar power to take a dominant position and nearly all homes will have rooftop solar PV.

Siemens also proposes to link Western Australia to the eastern seaboard grid system through a DC transmission network, enabling the use of large-scale solar and geothermal power stations in central Australia (unsurprisingly, given that they are one of the leaders in this field).

The Business Spectator has an article on combined solar thermal and gas fired power stations (the technically unambitious option those who don't want to pay for in-built energy storage go for - however its still streets ahead of more coal fired power or regular gas) - Solar and gas are the perfect fit.

Some of the sector may be wondering at the timing of the comments by Australian Solar Energy Society John Grimes – who buckets federal Energy Minister Martin Ferguson in the article as “clearly no fan of solar” and dismisses the Rudd government as not likely to get its solar policy settings right even in its next term – at a point when the government is formally taking in applications for grants from its $1.5 billion “solar flagships” program.

Next Monday is the deadline for applications to be handed in and the government intends to announce the first tranche of awards in July (in time to boast about them at the federal election thereafter, one assumes).

One of the ironies of the situation is that a favourite to win a sizeable chunk of the government’s millions – to be handed over by Martin “No Fan” Ferguson – will be one of the fossil-fuelled companies with a proposal to link solar thermal and peaking power gas, claimed as a world first development in industrial-sized generation.

Brisbane-based ERM Power, Australia’s largest private electricity generator, is making no secret of its desire to be the first in this race. It is interested in building a solar/gas hybrid plant at its planned Wellington power station in New South Wales or at its third Braemar station in central Queensland, preferably both, working with giant global engineering business Siemens as the technology provider.

The concept is simple: use the solar generation when the sun’s available and switch to gas as back-up when it isn’t.

New South Wales director Andy Pittlik says the Wellington project, which ERM Power sees as the next cab off the rank in its building program after constructing four other gas plants in the past 18 months with 1,740 MW capacity, will also use new open-cycle technology that produces more power while burning less fuel.

Managing director Phillip St Baker, son of founder and chairman Trevor, claims the company is on track to build about a third of Australia’s new generating capacity in the next five years after contributing half of new construction in the past five.

He says the biggest drawback to solar thermal power production is the “very, very expensive” cost of storing electricity for the 12 hours a day the sun doesn’t shine. “That’s why we want to integrate the technologies to deliver affordable, reliable power 24 hours a day – and, when you integrate solar and gas, you can make use of common infrastructure such as the boiler and the steam turbine, too.”

St Baker says the company is also looking at building a 900 kilometre gas pipeline to link its now-commissioned Braemar 2 peaking plant on Queensland’s Darling Downs with the proposed Wellington development, near Dubbo. This $500 million link would interconnect coal seam gas resources with conventional gas supply from Victoria.

Earth2Tech has a report on progress on Brightsource's large CSP plant in California - Siemens to Build 123MW Solar Turbine Generator for BrightSource.

BrightSource Energy has contracted Siemens(s SIE) to build a 123-megawatt solar-powered turbine generator for its massive Mojave Desert solar-thermal projects, the Oakland, Calif.-based startup announced today. Having raised more than $160 million (including$115 million from Google.org, BP, and other big investors in Series C financing last May) and snagged a deal to sell California utility PG&E up to 900 megawatts of solar power, BrightSource apparently decided not to let delays in the state approval process slow it down.

Building a steam turbine generator — which converts hot steam into mechanical work — takes years. So while BrightSource plans to begin construction on its Ivanpah Solar Power Complex in 2009 if California regulators give the green light, the company does not expect the Siemens generator (the companies say it will be the largest of its kind ever built) to arrive until 2011 — mere months before the company plans to begin supplying electricity to utilities. That leaves very little room for error if the company is to meet its deadlines.

“It takes time and patience and a lot of planning ahead to make all of this work well,” John Woolard, BrightSource CEO and a partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, the startup’s lead investor, told the San Francisco Business Times in August. That’s when the Bureau of Land Management ushered BrightSource to the front of the line for approval of applications to build utility-scale solar projects in the federally-managed desert. “Fortunately,” he said, “this is something we’re not bad at.”